Available for the first time in a beautiful standalone edition, one of Colm Tóibín’s finest short stories and “the most striking example of Tóibin’s emotional control” (The Guardian), “A Long Winter,” is set in the mountains of Catalonia in Spain—includes a new afterword by the author on how he came to write the story.

A young man named Miquel returns to his family in the Catalan Pyrenees upon completing his military service. His younger brother, Jordi, will be departing for his service a week after Miquel’s arrival. He will be gone for two years. Miquel notices their mother’s increasingly erratic behavior and understands that she is drinking.

As she becomes increasingly unstable, her husband resorts to drastic measures. Unable to abide his betrayal and her own grief, she walks off into the mountains. A blizzard sets in and the search for her is futile. No one will find her until the spring thaw arrives.

A gorgeous story of loss, grief, and longing, “A Long Winter” describes an extraordinary bond between a mother and son and a haunting portrait of a family in crisis. Tóibín’s powers of imagination and transfixing emotional insight are on full display.